First I want to thank everyone who responded to yesterday’s invitation to discuss your choices about having children (or not). Since I am not an astrologer, I don’t know what might be in your Fifth House that would have influenced those decisions.

But it is a serious choice, perhaps the most important one that we will ever make. I so appreciate your thoughtful replies, and sharing your musings about what it means to be a parent.

If you didn’t get a chance to reply yet, you still can. Please be welcome.

Meantime, as is my habit on the weekends, I turn things over to the viewpoints of others. Here are some randomly selected quotes about those mysterious little people that mean the world to us. Enjoy!

Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn’t music. ~William Stafford

Children are one third of our population and all of our future. ~Select Panel for the Promotion of Child Health, 1981

Even when freshly washed and relieved of all obvious confections, children tend to be sticky. ~Fran Lebowitz

Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man. ~Rabindranath Tagore

You are worried about seeing him spend his early years in doing nothing. What! Is it nothing to be happy? Nothing to skip, play, and run around all day long? Never in his life will he be so busy again. ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, 1762

Children need love, especially when they do not deserve it. ~Harold Hulbert

If our American way of life fails the child, it fails us all. ~Pearl S. Buck

In the United States today, there is a pervasive tendency to treat children as adults, and adults as children. The options of children are thus steadily expanded, while those of adults are progressively constricted. The result is unruly children and childish adults. ~Thomas Szasz

Children are unpredictable. You never know what inconsistency they’re going to catch you in next. ~Franklin P. Jones

Children make you want to start life over. ~Muhammad Ali

Boy, n.: a noise with dirt on it. ~Not Your Average Dictionary

Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized. ~Margaret Atwood

Ralph Waldo Emerson had a couple of pithy thoughts about kids:
There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.

And –
A child is a curly dimpled lunatic.

Writer and social commentator Robert Brault has this to say:
In a dark moment I ask, “How can anyone bring a child into this world?” And the answer rings clear, “Because there is no other world, and because the child has no other way into it.” ~Robert Brault

The world is as many times new as there are children in our lives. ~Robert Brault

If we would listen to our kids, we’d discover that they are largely self-explanatory. ~Robert Brault

If you haven’t time to respond to a tug at your pants leg, your schedule is too crowded. ~Robert Brault

On the other hand..What is a home without children? Quiet. ~Henny Youngman

It is not easy to be crafty and winsome at the same time, and few accomplish it after the age of six. ~John W. Gardner and Francesca Gardner Reese

There are only two things a child will share willingly – communicable diseases and his mother’s age. ~Benjamin Spock, Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, 1945

Here’s a couple of my favourite quotes about teenagers(that I found when I had the blessed creatures):
“Arguing with a teenager is like wrestling with a pig in s–t you both get dirty but the pig loves it!”
and on a billboard from the provincial government one spring:
“Hire a teenager this summer.. they know everything”

Several years ago, I came across a site that had quotes from kids answering a question about what words of wisdom they have for other kids. I still remember this piece of sage advice from an elementary school-aged girl: